Thursday, 18 May 2017

In Local China, Not All Cleanup Campaigns Are About Corruption

Much of the time, that sort of news doesn't merit anything
more than local media coverage or government pronouncements about achievements.
The Establishment Narrative about China from outside China (or the Beltway) seeks
sharper fare to feed on—environmental activists sounding off and being rounded
up, public protests about pollution, exposés about toxic landscapes and poisoned
children, or Beijing with its noxious air nonetheless somehow leading the world
on climate change. That Narrative focuses on the grassroots and the grave discontent
purportedly lurking in the social soil, not the government and its attempts to
problem-solve.

Those are important stories, but they’re not the whole book.
Policies pursued by local officials to improve The Nearby in China—which is
what really matters to residents and underpins legitimacy [合法性]—deserve
notice and, as in the present instance, praise.

But it’s also more complicated. Nanjing not only needs more drinking
water for residents; it wants to make sure that the water it has and gets is
better managed—cleaner, as well as easier to control in the event of the sort
of flooding
that plagued the city and surrounding areas last year. City
officials have noted in recent months the importance of mitigating the
overflowing of rivers and streams in Nanjing’s eastern section, near Purple
Mountain and adjacent natural and historical habitats. They know that the city has a water problem.

The easiest approach would have been to pull down a lot of
trees; denude the landscape to construct conduits, sluice gates, and concrete watercourses;
and work to capture and channel the flow in a large-scale, high-profile
project.

Instead, Nanjing planners focused on the
downstream—literally.

Officials here recognized, after extensive consultation with local
scientists and other experts, that if there was going to be a large-scale
investment of funds and other resources, the city needed to go all-in, and do
the essential micro-work: Demolish illegal structures bordering waterways (including
the Qinhuai District office of the city’s Sanitation Bureau built near a local canal); tear down toilets
and dry cleaners adjacent to canals to stop emissions; and not only clean up
bodies of water in the municipal area, but make sure they stayed that way by
increasing patrols to enforce regulations and setting up centrally-controlled systems
to monitor Nanjing’s many water places.

That’s why there’s been a cleanup of Crescent Lake: It’s
part of this general strategy to upgrade the city’s waterways as a whole, instead of just fixing part of the problem.

And the Crescent Lake project itself has been a massive effort.

According to the aforementioned account in Wednesday’s Nanjing Daily, 460,000 cubic meters of
silt were removed, equivalent to 30,000 large truckloads. The lake was drained,
dredged, and a 200 square meter island for migrating waterfowl constructed.

There were upgrades and repairs to facilities astride the lake as well. New water
pipelines and drainage systems were installed in communities on the east side
of Crescent Lake, to divert sewage lines from emptying into the lake. Walkways were resurfaced to absorb water, instead of allowing it to spill into the lake.

Interestingly enough, two popular restaurants adjacent to
Crescent Lake, as well as a small amusement park, will continue to operate.
Local rumors have always tied at least the restaurants to specific government
departments, and so political connections might have trumped pollution control
measures in this instance.

How this project was conceived, managed, and presented is
worth a study in itself. Nanjing authorities provided a central phone number to
call in with complaints and suggestions about the Crescent Lake cleanup
specifically, something apart from the
ongoing initiative in the city to field the concerns of residents. Schedules
and plans for the project were posted and openly shared on-site, and the mobile
phone numbers of the managers and supervisors were displayed for citizens to
call directly if they had questions. This was a well-conceived, well-organized
experiment in policy that actually reached out to the public—something rare in China,
though
not so uncommon these days in Nanjing and other parts of Jiangsu.

There are all sorts of instances in China where local
authorities have been lousy and irresponsible, corrupt and draconian, selfish
and stupid. This wasn’t one of them. Sometimes good governance at the local level can be found by
just looking around.

2 comments:

Nice to see this happening. I lived in Nanjing for three years. One of the nice things about Nanjing were the canals. They weren't anything special, but I was happy that they still existed. In Tokyo, evidently, they had used the canals to construct roads or the metro -- I can't remember which. It would be wonderful if more of the canals, starting around Fuzimiao, became more usable.

Thanks very much for your comment. Fuzimiao [夫子庙] has been using the canals for tours, and it seems to be successful without sullying the waters or the general environment. It will be interesting to see if some of that effort to employ some of the waterways will be replicated. Local news in Nanjing has said that might happen, but has not followed up in, recent months at least.